Maria tilted her head when she saw her Jan wedged in the crowd but agitating unheard. For she said to herself: In a minute he'll feel cold, all alone with his talk. In a minute he'll look for me, to unload on. Because when I'm not with him, it's only fear that makes him talk. In a minute I'll say: Jan, you're right. We must take a historic view of this. It never stops. Not even under Communism. It's always the bottom against the top. In those days the bosses were called patricians. They made Scania herring expensive. They raised the price of pepper, though there was plenty of it. They kept saying: The Danes are to blame. They've raised the Oresund tolls. Everything is going up. That's the way it is. You've got to accept it. The party says so. And the party is right, always right. And the party says it's too soon for freedom.
When Jan found his Maria again in the crowd, she said, "Come on. We'll go to the shipyard now. There we'll be safe. They've got everything. So we'll wait. No matter how long it goes on. So the wedding will be after Christmas, and just as much fun."
It was only when the crowd began to disperse that there was fighting with the police. Some of the railroad-station windows were smashed. Some newspaper stands went up in flames. Later the party building was set on fire. Morale, in the main, was high. The workers had seen what a big crowd they were. Some were arrested, whereupon a part of the crowd marched to the Schiessstange Prison, where gasoline was thrown in through the windows. A boy was run over by a tank. But so far there was no shooting.
It wasn't until the next day — when the workers of the Lenin Shipyard withdrew to the shipyard grounds, posted guards at the gates, and, in case the army occupied the shipyard, made preparations to blow up essential installations and send several unfinished ships down the ways; when units of the People's Army came rolling from Warsaw, and the police closed its ring around the shipyard area; when pork and cabbage with caraway seed was cooked for more than two thousand men in the shipyard canteen; when outside the main entrance to the shipyard a few young workers tried to start a discussion with the police, and Jan Ludkowski, speaking through a megaphone, first outlined the historical background of the strike, from the uprisings of the medieval guilds to the insurrection of the sailors and workers of Petro-grad for the Soviet system and against the party bureaucracy to the present rise in prices and the strike committee's demands for worker management of the factories; when finally Jan quoted from the Communist Manifesto and raised his full, mellifluous male voice, to which only the cause lent a note of harshness, till it carried as far as the Old City — that the police fired, wounding several workers. Five fatally. Among them Jan.
There was also shooting in Gdynia, Szczecin, and Elb-lag. The most numerous fatalities (over fifty) seem to have occured in Gdynia, where the police lobbed mortar shells into the crowd and fired machine guns from helicopters. Then, in Warsaw, Gomulka was toppled. The new man's name was Gierek. He rescinded the price increases on staple foods. The workers thought they had won and called off their strike, although their demand for worker management of the factories had remained unanswered.
When Jan was shot by the police, he was hit in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage, and not, as he had wished in poems (after Maiakovsky), in the forehead. In midsentence he was dead. Maria couldn't help when the dead and wounded were carried into the shipyard grounds. Just then she was taking delivery of a load of canned fish, which had been donated by the crews of two Soviet freighters then in drydock. Later she threw herself on the dead man, whose mouth was still open, and shook him as if in anger: "Say something just this once. Say it's right and logical. Say the facts speak for themselves. Say history proves. Say Marx foresaw. Say the future will. Say something, say…"
After Jan's death, Maria didn't stop working at the shipyard canteen. As long as the workers were negotiating with Gierek, the new man — an agreement of sorts was arrived at — plenty of supplies were delivered. The dead were buried quickly and quietly at various cemeteries in Emaus, Praust, and Ohra. The families were not admitted. Jan is thought to lie in Emaus. The other four dead were Upper Silesians, whom no one really knew. Their families in Katowice and Bytom were notified much too late. That brought protest. Regret was expressed in high places.
But such deaths don't really amount to much. Traffic accidents account for more. And the social services take better and better care of the widows and orphans. All were shot in the abdomen. The police had aimed low. Though this was recorded for later reference, none of the guilty parties was mentioned at any trial. It's perfectly true: life goes on.
The actual funeral service was held between Christmas and New Year's on the shipyard grounds, in the open, because the canteen was too small. A cold, windless day. Maria sat in black beside other women in black, facing the speaker's desk, the flowers, the flags, the music, the oil flame. The speakers (nearly all the members of the strike committee) repeated that these dead would not be forgotten. They said solidarity had brought victory, though all the workers' demands had not yet been met. Two ships were on the slips
nearby, manned only by gulls. (Big orders for Sweden. They'd have been sent down the ways unfinished if the police had stormed the shipyard.) Jan had been working on prospectuses in which progress was illustrated by photographs of ships' hulls. One of the speakers mentioned Jan's work, which he called imaginative. (Not mentioned was Jan's loudly and frequently repeated suggestion that newly built passenger vessels should be given Pomorshian names such as Swantopolk or Damroka. After all, Stephen Batory hadn't been a Pole but a Hungarian from Transylvania, and a ship had been proudly named after him.)
When at the end a party representative spoke, he apportioned blame but mentioned no names. Someone in the standing crowd of shipyard workers cried out, "Kociolek!" Maria didn't cry, because something was stuck in her throat. The other women in black cried. Between speeches they cried louder. Some of the men cried, too.
After the speeches the shipyard band played first solemn, then militant music. The gulls rose from the tankers on the slips and settled down again. After that an actor recited a poem that Jan had written about death. True, the poet who "lived himself to death" in this poem was the Baroque poet and court historian Martin Opitz, but in the setting of the funeral, and thanks to the actor's interpretive emphasis, the line "And with his halted blood his words, too, ceased to flow" related exclusively to Jan. This line was repeated in every stanza.
After the poem, Maria, who had something in her throat, threw up. Two men from the workers' guard led the still-retching woman in black past the speakers, flowers, and flags, past the oil flame and the band, to a place between two sheds, where she finished vomiting. Before the funeral, Maria had gone to the hairdresser's.